Lucy wasn’t a fraud. Here skeleton preserved over 40% of her body and hundreds of skeletons of her species have been found. While they are most likely to be ancestral to us, there is no final proof in a more advanced immediate descendent yet.
According to Richard Leakey, who along with Johanson is probably the best-known fossil-anthropologist in the world, Lucy’s skull is so incomplete that most of it is ‘imagination made of plaster of paris’.1 Leakey even said in 1983 that no firm conclusion could be drawn about what species Lucy belonged to.
In reinforcement of the fact that Lucy is not a creature ‘in between’ ape and man, Dr Charles Oxnard, Professor of Anatomy and Human Biology at the University of Western Australia, said in 1987 of the australopithecines (the group to which Lucy is said to have belonged):
“‘imagination made of plaster of paris’” I liked that ,,,,,sort of like “liberal “thought”